


A Network of Stories

by still_lycoris



Category: Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Fear, Gen, Introspection, Story within a Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-14
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:08:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26730388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/still_lycoris/pseuds/still_lycoris
Summary: Ace and the Doctor land on a planet and Ace finds herself attacked in a most unusual way ...
Comments: 8
Kudos: 13
Collections: Remix Revival 2020





	A Network of Stories

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JustMcShane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustMcShane/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Foundling Bird](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19818886) by [JustMcShane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustMcShane/pseuds/JustMcShane). 



_Once upon a time_ ...

Ace looked out of the TARDIS and sighed.

“Professor. You promised something actually exciting. You said it was going to be bright lights and loud noises and something dramatic. Something _fun_. Not a planet of dust.”

“Dust?” the Doctor said, sounding distracted. He was still at the controls, prodding at them, which probably meant he’d done something wrong again. Ace considered teasing him about it, but instead, she stepped to the edge of the TARDIS door and prodded the dusty expanse with her toe. It was thick and grey and a bit spongy and bits of it puffed up from her boot, filling the air before slowly settling down again into a flat, boring surface.

“Ugh. You sure it’s not toxic, Professor? Don’t fancy coughing my lungs up until you find some sort of cure, you know?”

“There’s no sign of toxins,” the Doctor said, prodding the control panel again. “This isn’t where we’re supposed to be at all. Very strange. The TARDIS must have been pulled off course – but then, unplanned trips are always the most interesting, don’t you think?”

Ace grinned. Okay, this particular unplanned trip actually looked pretty uninviting but at the same time, she wasn’t going to turn down a challenge like that. Maybe there _was_ something hidden in all this bland mess and if there was, she and the Professor were the ones that would find it. That was how it was because that was what they did.

She jumped out of the TARDIS, grimacing a bit as big clouds of dust puffed up around her. She didn’t really want to breathe it in, even if it wasn’t poison. It looked like it would make you choke.

“Smells like the lost property cupboard at school. Only better. This kid called Jimmy, he used to smoke fags in there, till he accidentally set fire to some lost jumper. They kept it locked after that!”

She wished she hadn’t thought of fire. It was cold here. Cold in a flat, wintery way – which was hardly surprising, she couldn’t see the sun. The sky was light but as grey as the dust that stretched out around them in a seemingly unending carpet. There was a slight breeze, but only very slight, a faint movement that tickled her hair and the back of her neck in a way that she thought anybody else might have described as creepy.

“You know, an explosion would really liven this place up,” she said, giving the Doctor a sideways glance. He glared at her.

“Ace, you have just arrived on an alien planet, filled with a myriad of mysteries. Possible wonders that most humans couldn’t even imagine and your first thought is to try and blow it up?!”

Ace grinned again. It was always fun to wind the Doctor up. She wouldn’t actually _do_ it, not when there wasn’t anything to explode. And if the dust was flammable, it would probably end up torching the area and that would be cool looking but also dangerous in a way that she wasn’t interested in. But she might as well amused herself a bit, since it looked like this was going to be a total dud.

“You coming or what?” she called and took another step.

It wasn’t like falling. In fact, she was quite sure she didn’t fall at all. She felt a lurch in her stomach as though gravity had changed in some way and then it was as though the dust just grew up around her, suddenly surrounding her with thick grey nothing. She thought she heard the Doctor shout her name but didn’t dare shout back, not when she was suddenly surrounded by the invasive, creepy stuff. She clamped her mouth and eyes shut and tried to push the dust away from her face but it was so soft that it felt as though there was nothing to move. She heard the Doctor cry out again but it was far away, so far away and then – 

Then it wasn’t real at all.

_Once upon a time, there was a normal girl who lived a completely boring life and never did anything even slightly interesting or unusual throughout her whole existence._

“Dot!”

She frowned, staring at the can of beans in her hand. What’s she got these for? She was supposed to be somewhere else, wasn’t she? Somewhere important ...

“Dot!”

She wanted to say that it wasn’t her name, that _nobody_ called her Dot, nobody ever had and never would if she had anything to do with it – but she didn’t seem to have anything to do with it. Her head was turning, almost against her will and she was looking at another girl, a girl about her age who was smiling at her, wearing the shop uniform. She felt her own mouth quirk in a grin back, as though she knew this girl, as though she was glad to see her.

“Come on Dot! Drinks after work, yeah?”

“Yeah,” she heard herself say and her voice sounded cheerful, happy, like it was normal. “Sure, Allie. Drinks after work.”

Allie walked away and she found herself shelving baked beans, lining them neatly up in rows. Boring but whatever. Life was boring, wasn’t it? She was grown up now and what could she expect, after getting expelled? At least she’d got a proper job, put a bit of money away for a rainy day. She was doing good really. Allie was good fun and the others were all right and the Boss wasn’t a bad sort. Yeah, she didn’t mind this ...

( _I’m Ace! Ace! This isn’t me! This isn’t ME!_ )

It took all her energy to drop the last can of beans on the floor rather than place it on the shelf where she knew she should. It rolled slowly away down the aisle and she made her arms move, grabbing another can and then another, dropping them with force, even throwing them. She wasn’t Dot, she would never be Dot, she never _wanted_ to be Dot – 

Her vision went grey.

_Once upon a time, there was a normal girl who didn’t appreciate everything her poor, hard-working mother did for her. She behaved badly and blew things up, got herself expelled and ended up exactly where you would expect._

The cell was grey but Ace was used to that. They’d let her stick things on the wall in the last place and she suspected they would here too, when she showed them that she was a model prisoner and all that. She was a model prisoner too. She wasn’t interested in causing trouble – well, not the kind of trouble that you got into once you’d gone to jail, anyway. She’d defend herself if she had to though, she was good at that when necessary. That was why they’d moved her – the last place, a couple of the women had got a bit aggressive with her and she’d needed to show them that nobody messed her about. It hadn’t really gone that far but the governor had said she’d thought she’d do better on transfer and so – 

( _I’m not in jail! This isn’t real! I’m not here!_ )

– so here she was, new place to get used to – 

( _No!_ )

She stared at the walls, at the plastic bag in her hand that contained all of her things, fighting her mind. There was something else, wasn’t there? Something else, something that was real, something that was realer than this because this wasn’t real at all, it wasn’t, it wasn’t, it wasn’t –

 _Once upon a time, there was a girl who managed to get herself thrown onto another world, but that world was just as boring as the previous one_.

Iceworld. Waitressing. Bored and frustrating and desperate to get away, to go somewhere – and drowning in the knowledge that there was nowhere to go. Nothing to dream of. Everywhere was the same, wasn’t it? You found yourself in another world but nobody cared about you, not really. They didn’t even care that you came from another world because here, that wasn’t interesting. You just got on with it.

Her Mum had always said that.

“I never, ever agree with my _mother!_ ”

 _Once upon a time, there was a girl who lived an exciting life for a very short time and then returned to the real world and did nothing of interest ever again_.

Back in a shop, only this time, she’s miserable.

She used to travel the universe. Fight Daleks and Cybermen and a hundred other horrors. She was brave and cool and tougher than anyone else. And then the Doctor had dropped her off and said goodbye and she was back in the real world. Back here, stuck in Perivale, small and meaningless and nobody. A meaningless, pointless – 

“No,” Ace said.

The world seemed to jar, only a little, but it did, almost like someone had hit it with a stick and made it ripple. She clenched her fists and stared around her, focusing every bit of her 

“That’s not me. None of these people are me and you can’t make them me. I’ll leave the Professor one day and I’ll still be brilliant and I’ll _never_ be boring because I am me and I was me before I met him and I’ll be me forever. Now _let me go!_ ”

The world shimmered, then shattered, shop pieces flying everywhere and disintegrating into thick, grey dust that dropped soundlessly to the ground. Ace stood for a moment, blinking, then turned.

“Professor?”

He was about to step out of the TARDIS but had apparently stopped as she said his name, frozen in a comic half step. He blinked at her.

“Fat lot of good _you_ were,” Ace said, because she needed to say something, something that didn’t suggest she was scared or shocked or anything stupid like that. “I think that stuff just tried to eat me!”

“Oh no, not eat you,” the Doctor said. “It was just trying to psychically devour your stories, that’s all. Your body would have stayed quite intact.”

“Well, that makes me feel an awful lot better, thanks!”

She jumped back into the TARDIS, noticing as she did that dust was beginning to turn the familiar blue shape grey and fuzzy. She looked down at herself but saw no dust remaining at all, not even on the soles of her boots.

“Professor, what just happened?”

“Do you know, I’m not actually quite sure, I’ve never seen anything quite like it before. I believe you and I have found an undiscovered – or rather undocumented – species.”

“ _You_ and I? I think you’ll find it was me that discovered it! I saw all this ... weird stuff. Stuff that didn’t happen”

“That fits with thy readings,” the Doctor agreed, staring down at the TARDIS controls thoughtfully. “As I said, they were trying to swallow you up.”

“But you just said – ”

“The _important_ part of you,” the Doctor said, sounding impatient now. “The body is such an irrelevance to who you really are. Change it and the true essence, the reality remains constant in most beings. Why, some can even change every cell and still be the same person, give or take a few behavioural quirks. If someone put your brain in another body, you would still be Ace! You would still want to investigate, to explore, to discover, to occasionally blow up what should be left intact! That’s what these creatures wanted – that part of you. You saw things that never happened? They placed you there to see you, to see what you would become, what you would be, even if it was never what you _would_ be. What are we but stories, after all? What are we but the tales people tell, the fairy stories round the fire?”

Ace found this ramble mostly made sense, although she wasn’t sure how she felt about it. She couldn’t help suspecting that the Doctor was talking about something he knew about. There was that look in his eye, that glimmer that told you he was thinking about something he had lived through but that he wasn’t going to tell her.

“What about you?” she said.

“I never left the TARDIS. The old girl shielded me,” he said easily. Too easily, perhaps? By now, Ace knew she couldn’t always trust what the Doctor said. Couldn’t always believe every story he told, every explanation that he gave. Had he experienced similar things to her; nightmares about stories that never came to be, things that he simply didn’t want to tell her about because they were too frightening? Too real?

Or something else.

Ace shivered. 

“Come on. Let’s leave them undocumented for a bit longer. You promised me bright lights, not dopey dreams!”

The Doctor smiled at her and flipped a switch. The TARDIS shuddered and groaned – did it shudder and groan a little more than usual? Did it struggle a little to shake of the burden of the dust? Or was that Ace’s imagination?

But it didn’t matter. The TARDIS was stronger than any planet and she took them out of there, away from the dust of ended stories and straight into the bright lights of another tale. And if the dust that was left behind was a just a little thicker, there was nobody there to see it.


End file.
